tinian Authority. (Iran has denied the connection.) This was a puzzling esca- lation, according to American security experts. Ship traffic in the Persian Gulf is closely monitored; the Iranians had to know that the scheme would be found out. Indeed, it almost seemed an in- tentional effort to infuriate the United States and burnish Iran's radical creden- tials in the Islamic world. But,just as the Irarnan government had taken at least three different public positions on the September 11th attacks, so it stood on rapprochement with the United States, support for the Palestinian rejection- ists, and almost every other public issue: there are shadings and subtleties, con- flicting statements and occasional out- rages. A purpose:fiù opacity seems the only Me. "Iran is a kaleidoscope," says Kenneth Pollack, who is the deputy director of national-security studies for the Council on Foreign Relations and who was a di- rector for Persian Gulf affaIrs at the Na- tional Security Council during the Clin- ton Administration. "There are fourteen dozen different positions on each issue, and it is very difficult to say with any certainty which of the insiders support which position. Khatami indicated a willingness to accommodate the United States on the three basic areas important to America: weapons of mass destruc- tion, the Palestinian question, and Iran's covert-intelligence activities. But he couldn't get anywhere with Khamenei and the hard-liners. It's not impossible that some of them were sending a mes- sage to Khatami as well as to us with the K . A " arlne . K hatami, Khamenei, Khomeini, Raf- sanjani: the names are easily con- fused by inattentive Westerners, who tend to have only two indelible images of post-revolutionary Iran-the furious visage of Ayatollah Khomeini and, in 1979, the blindfolded, stumbling Amer- icans held hostage in the Tehran Em- bassy compound by radical students. Iran's upheaval was the first success- ful religious revolution in the Islamic world, threatening not only to the West but also to the secular dictators and royal families who controlled every other na- tion in the region. The new Islamic Re- public of Iran went through an early messianic phase, in which the country's Shiites attempted to export Islamic rad- icalism-a difficult sale in a world where eighty-five per cent of MuslIms are Sunni. Iran was particularly active in Lebanon, where American hostages were seized in the nineteen-eighties, and the United States Embassy and Marine barracks were bombed in 1983. Two years of J acobin terror within Iran ended only when Iraq's Saddam Hussein in- vaded and an unspeakably brutal eight- year war ensued, in which at least three hundred thousand Iranians were killed. Khomeini died in 1989, just after a sullen truce took hold. The second decade of the Islamic Republic was a fretful at- tempt to recover from war and mayhem. A glacial power struggle has followed. Indeed, in Iran it is practically impossible to get a clear answer to the simplest of questions: Who is running this coun- try? Quite often, the response is nervous laughter. Academics, when asked, will draw inconclusive flow charts of the government's structure: there are shadow institutions everywhere-regular courts and clerical courts, a regular army and a revolutionary army; an elected parlia- ment and a clerical Council of Guardians. At the top of these charts sits the Su- preme Leader-but Ayatollah Khamenei is widely regarded as a mediocrity, and no one seems entirely convinced that he is actually in charge. The most vehement, and surprisingly frequent, answer to the question tends to be the most melodra- matic. "There is a small group, a dark group, that really runs the country;" a prominent Tehran businessman told me. "They decide who is assassinated and who is arrested, they threaten and blackmail the leaders. They never speak publicl " But, then, Iranians are inveterate con- spiracy theorists; there are always inter- national cabals directed against their na- tion, inevitably orchestrated by either the British, who held the country as a semi- colony after the discovery of oil, or the Americans. There is sufficient evidence of Anglo-American misbehavior to make this theory credible: there was the 68 THE NEW YORKER., FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2002 C.I.A. -sponsored coup that toppled the popular, nationalist Prime Minister, Mo- hammad Mossadegh, and restored the Shah to power, in 1953; there was the continuing American support for the Shah's vicious secret service, the SAVAK; there was the covert but obvious support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War (including, the conspiracy theorists insist, the provision of chemical and bi- 0logical weaponry); there was the acci- dental shooting down of an Iran Air jumbo jet over the Persian Gulf: in 1988, which nobody believes was an accident. "Is it not possible that Bush himself or- chestrated the September 11th attacks?" a college professor in Isfahan asked me after an hour of careful, sophisticated political analysis. "He did not really win the election, and this was a way to unite the nation behind him." And so Avàs comic-book metaphor carries with it a fundamental truth: Iran, at times, can seem like Bizarro World, the shattered, doppelgänger planet from the Superman comic books. Western visitors note the difference between the austerity of public life and the normality of private life: for years, the most popu- lar journalistic image has been of Iranian women wearing designer dresses be- neath their chadors. A pirated version of Victoriàs Secret recently opened in Tehran-no lingerie is visible from the street, of course. Cosmetic surgery is all the rage. "We are the world capital of nose jobs," an Iranian woman writer told me. "Think about it-when the mullahs took away our bodies, all we had left were our faces. Look at the noses on the v ' ll " street. .1 ou see. But the most striking thing about the street is how relaxed it is There isn't an oppressive police or military presence, and not much of a religious presence, ei- ther: few mullahs wander about (ex- cept in Qgm, the religious center, and a few other holy sites). Indeed, there is little sense of the political fervor com- mon to ((the street" in other Islamic coun- tries. Iranians are still recuperating from their radical moment. "We want a refo- lution, not a revolution," Hamid Reza Jalaipour, a newspaper publisher who was jailed briefly; said. He was referring to the radical reforms many Iranians are seeking. "We've had enough violence." Most Westerners who visit Iran are surprised by how unexceptionally mod-